Only half correct. English is roughly 50% French and 50% German.
The English dictionary is also about 50% larger than the French Dictionary. The length of the German dictionary is irrelevant because: Hottentotenstrottelmutterattentäterlattengitterwetterkotterbeutelratte
It is very frequent in English to use both the French word and the German word for the same thing in different situation.
I remember the "History of English Podcast" covering a lot of this. I'm more a programming language nerd than spoken language, but I still found it fascinating.
Old English was a Germanic language, later heavily influenced by Norman/French vocabulary. French of course descended from Latin, and Latin and Germanic languages both belong to the Indo-European family of languages. (The "C" language of humanity, if you will.)
French was forcibly thrust on the population in 1066, but of course the conquerors were the elite, and the defeated, their servants. So if you tend a cow, you call it with the Germanic word: cow, not vache. But if you consume its expensive meat, you name it in French: boef / beef, not rind(fleisch).
Careful: English is just as Germanic as German is. It's easy to conflate "German" with Proto-Germanic and create the incorrect assumption that English evolved from German, when both languages share a common ancestor as part of the West Germanic family of languages.
English has certainly diverged quite a lot, but there are other ways it stayed the same and German diverged; for example, the infamous "th" sounds were at one time common to all Germanic speakers, but was lost among mainland Germanic speakers while English (as well as Icelandic) kept it.
No, because unlike Germany, England was for hundreds of years ruled by a nobility that was French speaking (until English emerged from a blend of French and Old English (which was Germanic).
You could certainly make the case that English is not a Germanic language. You would be in contradiction with the linguistic mainstream, who recognize a direct lineage between Old English, Middle English and Modern English. You would also be placing much import on the influence of loanwords on a language, enough so that the presence of such would divorce the victim language from its linguistic family entirely!
> Only half correct. English is roughly 50% French and 50% German.
The article claims different proportions: "Half of all English vocabulary comes from those three Romance roots, compared to less than a third that comes from Germanic sources."
Still only half correct, but based of those proportions it is more correct than claiming English is a Germanic language.
It's not clear where the quite significant remaining proportion of the English language comes from. Colonial languages?
The real point of the essay discussed in the article is that the French origin of (part of) the English language is Norman French, which was distinctly different from Parisian French and has pretty much vanished from Normandy since. So the argument is that English might be as close to Norman French as French is. The influence of Norman French on the English language was downplayed for political reasons, argues the author.
Ultimately words of Germanic origins might be fewer but more frequently used. The grammar is also potentially closer to the Germanic origins than to the French ones? Let the linguists debate this forever I guess.
One interesting observation is that French-derived words in English tend to be fancier -- formal, sophisticated, higher-class -- while Germanic ones tend to be more casual, everyday vocabulary.
Many of these words transferred during the Norman Conquest. During that time, England was ruled by French speakers. The upper class and nobility in England were French (and French speakers).
When someone in the upper class wanted boeuf, they wanted the meat of a cow - not the cow itself. And so beef entered the English language as the meat. This extended to other animals. In general, the word for the meat in English is the French word for the animal and the word for the animal is derived from the German word.
This also extended to the language law and things that the upper classes (rather than the commoners) dealt with. When the common English (germanic) did have to deal with those topics, they used the French words and those words were brought into English.
> The English dictionary is also about 50% larger than the French Dictionary....
> It is very frequent in English to use both the French word and the German word for the same thing in different situation.
It's kind of like in genetics: if a gene gets duplicated, it creates the opportunity for one copy to evolve to do something else. Likewise with language: having two words for the same thing allows their meanings to diverge without loss to cover more shades of meaning.
French had several hundred years of established literary tradition when English was still 'descending'.
Not that it matters, given that we are talking about this in English, which has become the lingua franca in an amusing twist of fate, thanks to the East India Company.
Beowulf, the earliest major work of English literature, is from somewhere between the 8th and 11th centuries. French certainly did not have "several hundred years of established literary tradition" by that time, even if you pick the latter date.
La Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland) is dated to between 1129 and 1165. It resembles modern French much more than Beowulf resembles modern English. Few English speakers today could read Beowulf.
This is a great example of moving the goalposts re the original (false) point that a previous comment made about French having a longer literary history than English.
If you’ve got a specific agenda, say x > y, you can be very selective about success criteria to suit yourself.
In this particular case of English and French, the reality is that few modern French speakers can read the Song of Roland. “Resembles x much more” is pretty irrelevant because it cherry-picks similarities while glossing over differences. One can equally say Old English’s “and forgyf us ure gyltas” is pretty readable, but really you’re scraping the bottom of the argument barrel.
Also glossing over an older literary tradition because the language mutated in response to a new political reality (conquest) is ... curious.
I don't think it's moving the goalposts to say that something understandable by modern French speakers has an older literary tradition than something understandable by modern English speakers. You can call what we speak today "English" but it barely resembles the language used in Beowulf.
You’re entitled to your opinion. All I’ll say is that in the context of the bald fact (French has an older literary tradition than English) presented by a previous commenter, “understandable by modern speakers” is moving the goalposts. In my opinion of course.
Also
> something understandable by modern French speakers
The Song of Roland, used as an example in a previous comment, doesn’t qualify, and actually is yet another reason why this line of argument is pretty sad.
The term "Old English" is completely misleading in this context given how distant modern English is from that language. Both were spoken in England, that's about it. Applying the same logic to "France", should we then consider Gallo-Roman works like Ausonius's Mosella (c. 370 CE) to be "French" literature?
The Beowulf manuscript dates from around 975 CE and is written in what might be better termed Anglo-Saxon. How much can you understand from this random sentence: "þa me þæt gelærdon leode mine, þa selestan, snotere ceorlas"? ("So my vassals advised me well…) I personally can't understand a single word or even relate it in any way to the English I know.
On the other hand, the Sequence of Saint Eulalia was composed in "Old French" in 880 BCE and seems rather intelligible to me. I also just took a random sentence from the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100 BC) and can understand all of it: "Seignurs, vos en ireiz. Branches d’olive en voz mains portereiz, Si me direz a Carlemagne le rei Pur le soen Deu qu’il ait mercit de mei." I'd even go so far as to say that's closer to modern French than Shakespearean English despite being written in Anglo-Norman … Which also means it should probably count as being English literature if Beowulf qualifies…
I guess the lesson here is simply to remember that reality is always a lot more granular than we first expect and that any sweeping judgements on languages, countries, etc. over the span of millennia make very little sense. By that criteria, the linked article was pure clickbait to begin with.
I see the French have been very busy with articles such as this.
Clearly an attempt to take the shine off of "that sub language english" which keeps pestering their ears.
From what I was repeatedly taught by my English, english teacher, all the latin loanwords came from when the Romans were hanging around the Isles. "They left more than walls!", she'd say.
Take care now, lest her ghost rise from the grave to correct your slanders against her beloved english.
English does not descend from Latin. It descends from Old English, a language that is entirely unrelated to Latin besides both being Indo-European, and has been influenced to a substantial degree by Norman French (which does descend from Latin) since the 11th century.
At least that is the conventional view. Apparently, according to this author, it actually descends from French. But that is a very fringe take.
The author does not actually make this claim, he only does tongue in cheek to show that Norman has a much larger influenced on the evolution of English vocabulary than usually thought.
English is 0% German other than loanwords like "zeitgeist".
What is more accurate to say is that English and German descend from a common ancestor: Proto-Germanic. Saying English descended from German would be just as wrong as saying German descended from English.
The fact that "German" and "Germanic" sound similar does not mean that they are the same thing, nor that modern standard German is somehow the official representative of the Germanic languages.
IIRC the reason that the family got the name "Germanic" is basically that it was some Germans that came up with the idea. I'm having trouble sourcing this though.
The romans called the area Germania after the germani that lived there. Germani is believed to be a celtic word though. So it's possible that the original Germani were actual celtic speakers. Which is another branch of old indo-european.
Last I heard was that the German tribe the language group was named after weren't even germanic soeakers. Like the fact that the Franks were a germanic speaking tribe who abandoned their language for the local dialect of latin which become French.
I don't know how much truth there is to this, but I've heard a story about the difference in French/Germanic word usage may stem from inequalities from the Norman invasion - the masters were speaking French, and the common folk were doing the dirty work speaking old English derived from germanic languages. So, the masters were dealing with the finished product with French words - beef, pork, mutton, veal, venison, poultry - and the commoners were dealing with animals with Germanic words - cow, pig, sheep, deer, chicken, etc
Don't fall for the divisive trolling... many places teach all three languages as part of the grade school curriculum. French is less concise structurally, German has phoneme that are difficult to pronounce, and English was derived from centuries of merging in countless trading partner pop cultures.
The reason English is difficult to learn is many generation 2 languages words are no longer directly correlated with the original meanings. There were even writers that made fun of what English would sound like to an unbiased observer. Don't ask your LLM "is there a Seahorse emoji"... =3
There is no such thing as purity or correctness in language - those concepts are farcical. Every second of every day language evolves with the words and pronunciations of the people currently using it. If enough people spell or pronounce the "wrong" way, it becomes the "right" way.
French today is slightly different than it was yesterday, and the day before, and 50 years ago.
I think we have like 5 words left from Gaul in modern french (only one I know is 'talus'). Old central French was mostly vulgar latin+frankish, with a bit of Gaulish and Arabic, then Gaulish was traded for latin and greek forcibly thanks to the french 'Academie' that made central/Parisian french the only french, and we lost a lot (a _lot_) of words. What's funny is that English, beside Normand french, borrowed a lot from French before that,and we borrowed those words back, with a different meaning, or sometimes a similar one.
People massively overstate the power and influence of the Académie française. It is essentially just a cultural organization. Sure, it claims to officially regulate the French language, but its decisions are not actually binding on anyone, not even the government or the education system, and are in fact widely ignored.
In actual practice, French is about as regulated as English is (i.e., not at all) and French people use tons of loanwords from various languages, especially English and Arabic.
It's been a while since I've talked about this with somebody from France, but if I remember correctly, they take pride in speaking real French rather than speaking pure French. I wish I remember the words they used.
In other words, they recognize the Académie as the authority on purity, and then reject purity.
How I wish we could cut these reactionary fossils from our tax money. It is nonsensical, and should no longer exist.
They are tasked with maintaining an "official" dictionary, but have only published 9 editions so far, in over 300 years. The last one, that was just finished (only took 45 years) misses very important words like "web", "mail" or "homophobie" because they're supposedly too recent, but somehow includes "woke". In a French dictionary. What a fucking joke.
If you actually put the sentences in that article into Google translate, it things you're speaking Ilocano, which is apparently a language from the Phillipines.
Google translate is actually making an eminently reasonable guess. Filipino languages are full of transliterated Spanish loan words. The syllabic structure of the sentences, though it still looks like gibberish to me, also bear more than a passing resemblance to Filipino languages.
Also, one could argue French itself is an agglomeration of Vulgar Latin (87%) as well as its own Frankish Germanic roots (10%), and a few of Gaulish and Breton Celtic origin.
It is not straightforward to define a metric like this. What counts as an "English word" ? There are books full of the scientific names of plant and animal species, which usually come from Latin; do these count as "English words" ? What's the cutoff?
IMO, a much better metric is frequency-weighted; that is, taking some corpus of real English and counting the words in it, rather than weighting "every English word" with the value 1.
If you do this frequency-weighted analysis, Old English is far ahead of French and Latin combined (especially in colloquial speech; they're closer in formal writing).
None of the languages have their own static existence. Just like a river doesn't have a precise start location and end location, a language doesn't have a precise boundary in space and time. More so in time. Language can't be separated from culture, people and place. All of these - language, culture, people, and places change massively over time, to the extent of losing identity.
If English doesn't exist on its own, French doesn't either. Nor does Latin, Greek or Sanskrit. All of these are incremental variations or dialects of some other language.
As a person with ears who is mildly versed in English and enough Spanish to get some landscaping done, it's extremely obvious that French is the badly pronounced English, and not vice versa.
> it was French that equipped English to become the language of international communication, _a state of affairs which should be celebrated as la francophonie’s greatest achievement_.
Imagine making this claim to a proud French language partisan. You'd have to rush them to the hospital.
French was in fact the language of international diplomacy prior to WWII. Russians, Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Italians, etc, would communicate in French.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
The author is right to critique Cerquiglini. The French legacy is largely lexical. The syntax and the old, short words of English are Germanic. Its several influences drove the relatively large lexicon we have, and probably adapted English to be a globally adaptive language, borrowing words readily.
Having Google Translate take that into French and then back gave me "The passengers of this jumbo jet, caught in a quagmire resembling an ocean liner, found a happy accident in this chaotic and surprising landing." I quite like both sentences.
The mutual borrowing between both languages is really amusing when visiting Montreal.
I sat down in a restaurant in the historic part of the city, and the menu was loaded with "apostrophe s" and "le Hamburger". I then looked at my server and said, in plain English, "My high school French teacher used to make fun of this as 'franglais'".
The server then laughed and told me, "oh, we mix English into French here all the time and don't care."
The next day I walked by a youth American football league in a city park.
Even my mother's household, which was Quebec-French speaking in the US, would say "poe-tat" instead of "pomme de terre." ("Potato" with a French accent instead of the literal "apple of the earth" word that I learned in school.)
Nice anecdotes, but the last one is a misinterpretation that got me into a rabbit hole. "poe-tat" is juste "patate" and is widely used not the least because it's just faster to say than "pomme de terre" (following Zipf's law of abbreviation and the principle of least effort). It's more informal, but it's pedigree is excellent as it comes from Taíno via Spanish, was first recorded in 1582 and recorded by the French Academy in 1762… which was actually only the case for "pomme de terre" in 1835! It seems that "pomme de terre" referred to other tubers in the distant past, but that the famous agronomist Parmentier remarketed "patates" as "pommes de terre" in the 18th century to promote their acceptance.
The fact is that, for a long time, British kings considered themselves kings of France as well - and even believed that France was the senior kingdom. The language they spoke reflected that attitude.
That said, as a Frenchman who has to speak English every day, I can assure you that English has long since become its own thing!
They spoke French because they were Normans and married mostly with the continental aristocracy.
Their claim to the French throne was based on the rules of succession and an argument over them (arising from those intertwinned lineages).
An interesting fact is that King Richard I (Sean Connery in Robin Hood with Kevin Costner)'s mother was from South West France and he grew up there, and so he spoke French and Occitan but not really English.
Henry IV was the first English king to speak english natively since before the conquest. Mel Gibson's Braveheart is particularly ridiculous because everyone would have been speaking various amounts of Norman French to each other in reality. Wallace, the Bruce, Edward I and II, the various other nobles.
The syntax has morphed from Germanic languages, but with Norman vocabulary. Norman was a dialect of French from before the standardization of l'Académie Française.
Yes, and Norman was a "creole" of a Germanic language brought in by the viking conquest and French, which itself is a creole of a Celtic-based language and Latin (due to the conquest of France by romans). Celts and Vikings were already presents in the British islands. See [1] for the "genealogy" of European languages. So William the Conqueror brought to England more of the same things plus a few more (and the endemic mismatch of spelling and pronunciation I guess).
France is sort-of at the crossroads of Europe, so it's no surprise that there's a little bit of everything in the French language. This is particularly visible in place-names of Normandy [2].
Nah - there are two vocabularies, the 'posh' Norman French one, and the common western Germanic one. (There is also an admixture of Norse influence, so the combination of Old English (Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians) with Old Norse then knocking the edges off. That probably did for grammatical gender.)
The Germanic core still generally gets used by all in high stress environments.
Latin and various forms of French are bigger contributors to overall vocabulary than German and Dutch. It does seem to me that much of the core vocabulary day to day or that would be used in a pidgin of English by word use frequency is more Germanic, but I personally don’t know of a study showing that.
And yes, certain situations do tend to favor the Germanic portions to include especially coarser words.
> Cerquiglini argues that the role of French in the birth of the English language was much deeper than is generally admitted. It is the French influence, he says, that saved English from being just another variant of Dutch. As such it was French that equipped English to become the language of international communication, a state of affairs which should be celebrated as la francophonie’s greatest achievement.
This sounds like either unfalsifiable bullshit being portrayed as scholarship, or deliberate trolling by a French guy who likes French and wants to mock English-speakers. I'd have more respect for the latter, since at least that's just making fun of a more powerful neighboring culture (a fun pastime for everyone) rather than trying to assert real facts about the world.
They’re just mad they lost the “lingua Franca” of the world title so this is the way for them to hang on to the coattails of relevance. The Normans didn’t even speak Parisian French but a Breton variant and also had with them some Norse words they kept. But they can pretend.
The only thing that made French and English afterwards the lingua francas of the world was the commerce/trade and innovation offered by their speakers.
We could all be using Spanish or Chinese as the lingua Franca if either of them had more influence in the world.
I agree with the sentiment, but Normans speaking a Breton variant of French… Oh gosh… And why "they"? What's with the lumping of 300+ million French speakers with the personal opinion of one person? What's that talk about relevance as if not being number 1 meant that the language was damned?
I have not read the linguist's essay, just the article, but I am almost certain the claims are preposterous.
The article already mentions that the structure is definitely germanic in origin. Next are the words. Some are adopted from other languages, but many more have roots in Germanic and Latin. The reason is that Romans invaded Britain some 2000 years ago. Afterwards, Latin was spoken in learned circles until the renaissance and even later.
When French became the language of diplomacy, IIRC at the time of Napoleon, only that's when French became a language of note. That's when the "sofisticated" words like veal, venison etc. enter the English language.
But, even all that aside, my native language is Slavic. I speak both English and German, and a very little bit of French. In my limited personal view, German and English have much more in common than French and English.
Reply to self: it seems I was wrong and veal, venison, etc. have roots in Old French, which has influenced Old English through Normandic invasion.
Still, I stand by my assessment: while it's clear that influences are there to some of the words, it's clearly more germanic. Just as we say today that French is a romanic language and English is germanic. I see no evidence here to counter this common classification.
See this excellent book: Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme and Other Oddities of the English Language
It details the historical reasons why English is completely broken in terms of spelling and pronunciation. It makes sense of why it’s such a mess. Light read, kinda fun (said the history nerd who loves language).
This seems to pay lip service* to Latin which was used in England for a thousand years before the Norman invasion and was still in use up to the 17th century. No, it wasn't used in the pub or the market, but it did influence the language strongly.
The whole thing does not make sense to me because the grammars are so different. In English you say "Mary's house". In French it's "La maison de Marie."
And yet, you'd say "the House of the Virgin Mary" or "the House of Windsor" in English (which translate to "la Maison de la Vierge Marie", but the "Maison Windsor" in French). English grammar has incorporated a lot of key Romance features alongside its Germanic ones.
The book's title is not from Clemenceau, but from Alexandre Dumas, in "Twenty years after" (the sequel to the Three Musketeers).
Fun fact: this passage is somehow excised from the English translation of the book used by Project Gutenberg and Wikisource! (you can see it in the original French version, chapter 68: "l'anglais n'est que du français mal prononcé")
Recently, as my kid is learning to read and write Danish, while I've started to use English more and more, due to work. My observation is that English isn't that great a language, it's just very popular. The more English I speak, read and write, the more I appreciate my own native language.
It's really sad to see English language and words replace native ones, especially if your own language in many cases have better precision and quite frankly reads better. Recently I listened to a "Danish" podcast, about Charlie Kirk. I put Danish in " " because one of the hosts, a native Dane, struggles severely with expressing her thoughts and observation without the use of English.
English is easy to criticize. It doesn't have all the letters it needs. It doesn't have compound noun. A significant part of the vocabulary is just borrow from Norse, German or French (and pronounced wrong). It is however VERY popular, billions speak it, and that's a quality all on it's own.
There's also the asymmetry that a Danish podcaster felt it necessary to talk about the English-speaking American Charlie Kirk, whereas I struggle to think of a time I've listened to an English-language podcast about a Danish poltical figure.
The popularity of English has little or nothing to do with any facts about how its grammatical system works, and a lot to do with the geopolitical situation of the past few centuries where the UK and then the US were globally important powers.
I wonder if the Nordic languages would be in a healthier state in this respect, in terms of usage and not resorting to English in mixed groups, if their television broadcasting had been shared among each other more, instead of each country looking so much to the USA for programming. The Nordic countries used to be a single linguistic space for educated people and you can still witness this practice among the elderly. Why exactly couldn't young people growing up in, for example, Sweden and Denmark watch and learn from Norway's Uti vår hage just like Americans could watch Monty Python or Fawlty Towers?
Norwegian and Swedish seems to be healthier than Danish. I don't have the feeling that Danes generally gives a shit about the health of the language and a decent percentage would probably favour just switching to English entirely.
Possibly, but I wonder why so many Danes prefer English words, when we have Danish words that are often more descriptive. My preference have also change over the years, from more heavily favouring English previously, to now opting for Danish whenever possible (e.g. when reading books).
I had an iconic Latin teacher that would wander the campus wearing headphones listening to opera at full blast and muttering to himself, "French is but a vulgar form of Latin."
"English isn’t a dialect of French. The grammatical structure of English is almost entirely Germanic and no amount of sophistry can change that."
It might be seen as a dialect of German but with the heavy influence English had on the German language in the past decades it's more that German is like an English dialect now.
You are right, of course. My point was more that German nowadays borrows more from English than vice versa. I should not have written "historically" (and have deleted it since), because that is obviously wrong. What I meant to say is that over time the direction of influence switched around.
Yes, it is a Germanic language. The title is a tongue-in-cheek jibe about how much the English language has borrowed from French and Latin. I believe the majority of English words come from Latin/French although the top 100 most spoken words are generally Germanic. People seem to forget that England was ruled by French speaking people for a long time, and that had a huge impact on the development of the English we speak today.
> The author knows this of course. His point is not to win the argument, but rather to give a new perspective on the traditional rivalry between the English and French languages.
One important thing not mentioned. English has no genders except in extremely rare cases. Other Indo-European languages are full of genders, like female tables, male autos, etc.
Trying to learn Spanish in high school, it was genders that confused me the most. Safe to say I just remember some words at this point.
I hate (I know, strong word but I really do) French and Latin possessives and French pronunciation. German makes much more sense and thankfully English is a Germanic language.
Danish is even better. More simplified with the exception of integrating the article into the word itself; other than that slightly simpler than English.
This is a linguist troll, by a French linguist. English is West and North Germanic, with Norman French, Latin, and Greek loans. In fact Latin loans are the same amount as French, 28% each.
Grammatical gender lets you be very precise with fewer words. I can say in German with just 4 words both "I am on the hill" and "I am passing over the hill" by just changing the case of one word. It's the same sentence but only one letter changes and it completely changes the meaning of the sentence.
That doesn't have anything to do with grammatical gender, it's because of noun declension that that is possible. It's only incidental that nouns of each of the three genders decline differently; case distinctions could still be made even if there was only one gender.
If you are going to have to remember an attribute for every single noun it should really be a MEANINGFUL one instead of something utterly arbitrary like gender. Some examples are animate or inanimate like Algonquian languages do or the physical properties of an object, such as its shape, size, or consistency like the Athabaskan languages do.
Only half correct. English is roughly 50% French and 50% German.
The English dictionary is also about 50% larger than the French Dictionary. The length of the German dictionary is irrelevant because: Hottentotenstrottelmutterattentäterlattengitterwetterkotterbeutelratte
It is very frequent in English to use both the French word and the German word for the same thing in different situation.
Beef (French: bœuf) / Cow (Germanic) Pork (French: porc) / Pig/Swine (Germanic) Mutton (French: mouton) / Sheep (Germanic) Veal (French: veau) / Calf (Germanic) Venison (French: venaison) / Deer (Germanic) Poultry (French: poulet) / Chicken/Fowl (Germanic) Purchase (French) / Buy (Germanic) Commence (French) / Begin (Germanic) Inquire (French) / Ask (Germanic) Receive (French) / Get (Germanic) Odor (French) / Smell (Germanic) Aroma (French, positive) / Stench (Germanic, negative) Cardiac (French/Latin) / Heart (Germanic) Ocular (French/Latin) / Eye (Germanic) Dental (French/Latin) / Tooth (Germanic)
I remember the "History of English Podcast" covering a lot of this. I'm more a programming language nerd than spoken language, but I still found it fascinating.
Old English was a Germanic language, later heavily influenced by Norman/French vocabulary. French of course descended from Latin, and Latin and Germanic languages both belong to the Indo-European family of languages. (The "C" language of humanity, if you will.)
At least in the case of meat vs animal, this was pointed out in Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe, published 1819-1820.
One I'll (badly) remember about English is:
English is the result of Norman soldiers trying to woo Anglo-Saxon barmaids, and for that task was, evidently, effective enough.
It was more that early English commoners had kept a more Germanic dialect, and french was slowly popularized with the aristocracy. =)
French was forcibly thrust on the population in 1066, but of course the conquerors were the elite, and the defeated, their servants. So if you tend a cow, you call it with the Germanic word: cow, not vache. But if you consume its expensive meat, you name it in French: boef / beef, not rind(fleisch).
Careful: English is just as Germanic as German is. It's easy to conflate "German" with Proto-Germanic and create the incorrect assumption that English evolved from German, when both languages share a common ancestor as part of the West Germanic family of languages.
> English is just as Germanic as German is.
Well yes and no. English generally diverged much more from the common ancestor than pretty much every other Germanic language.
Yeah other examples like Maltese which is technically an Arabic dialect but with half the vocabularies coming from Romance/Italian languages.
English has certainly diverged quite a lot, but there are other ways it stayed the same and German diverged; for example, the infamous "th" sounds were at one time common to all Germanic speakers, but was lost among mainland Germanic speakers while English (as well as Icelandic) kept it.
No, because unlike Germany, England was for hundreds of years ruled by a nobility that was French speaking (until English emerged from a blend of French and Old English (which was Germanic).
You could certainly make the case that English is not a Germanic language. You would be in contradiction with the linguistic mainstream, who recognize a direct lineage between Old English, Middle English and Modern English. You would also be placing much import on the influence of loanwords on a language, enough so that the presence of such would divorce the victim language from its linguistic family entirely!
true
> Only half correct. English is roughly 50% French and 50% German.
The article claims different proportions: "Half of all English vocabulary comes from those three Romance roots, compared to less than a third that comes from Germanic sources."
Still only half correct, but based of those proportions it is more correct than claiming English is a Germanic language.
It's not clear where the quite significant remaining proportion of the English language comes from. Colonial languages?
The real point of the essay discussed in the article is that the French origin of (part of) the English language is Norman French, which was distinctly different from Parisian French and has pretty much vanished from Normandy since. So the argument is that English might be as close to Norman French as French is. The influence of Norman French on the English language was downplayed for political reasons, argues the author.
Ultimately words of Germanic origins might be fewer but more frequently used. The grammar is also potentially closer to the Germanic origins than to the French ones? Let the linguists debate this forever I guess.
good points, thx
One interesting observation is that French-derived words in English tend to be fancier -- formal, sophisticated, higher-class -- while Germanic ones tend to be more casual, everyday vocabulary.
Many of these words transferred during the Norman Conquest. During that time, England was ruled by French speakers. The upper class and nobility in England were French (and French speakers).
When someone in the upper class wanted boeuf, they wanted the meat of a cow - not the cow itself. And so beef entered the English language as the meat. This extended to other animals. In general, the word for the meat in English is the French word for the animal and the word for the animal is derived from the German word.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/beef and https://www.etymonline.com/word/cow
This also extended to the language law and things that the upper classes (rather than the commoners) dealt with. When the common English (germanic) did have to deal with those topics, they used the French words and those words were brought into English.
I believe this is because the Normans were wealthier than the native Brits
My rough estimate is that words of two syllables or less are mostly Germanic and words of three syllables or more are mostly Romantic.
ça je ne crois pas
only the peasants spoke Old English. The nobility spoke French. eventually the two languages merged into modern English.
> The English dictionary is also about 50% larger than the French Dictionary....
> It is very frequent in English to use both the French word and the German word for the same thing in different situation.
It's kind of like in genetics: if a gene gets duplicated, it creates the opportunity for one copy to evolve to do something else. Likewise with language: having two words for the same thing allows their meanings to diverge without loss to cover more shades of meaning.
It is absolutely not french anything, but instead, french and english both decend from latin.
English decending from french you say! The nerve! (I assure you, my 6th grade english teacher would correct you thusly)
French had several hundred years of established literary tradition when English was still 'descending'.
Not that it matters, given that we are talking about this in English, which has become the lingua franca in an amusing twist of fate, thanks to the East India Company.
Heh. English actually has an older written tradition than French.
Not that it’s a competition or anything. But it’s interesting to see people make assumptions about easily-looked-up stuff.
Old English is pretty unintelligible by modern English speakers though. Middle English much more so, but wasn't that already French-influenced?
Beowulf, the earliest major work of English literature, is from somewhere between the 8th and 11th centuries. French certainly did not have "several hundred years of established literary tradition" by that time, even if you pick the latter date.
La Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland) is dated to between 1129 and 1165. It resembles modern French much more than Beowulf resembles modern English. Few English speakers today could read Beowulf.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_Roland
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chanson_de_Roland
This is a great example of moving the goalposts re the original (false) point that a previous comment made about French having a longer literary history than English.
If you’ve got a specific agenda, say x > y, you can be very selective about success criteria to suit yourself.
In this particular case of English and French, the reality is that few modern French speakers can read the Song of Roland. “Resembles x much more” is pretty irrelevant because it cherry-picks similarities while glossing over differences. One can equally say Old English’s “and forgyf us ure gyltas” is pretty readable, but really you’re scraping the bottom of the argument barrel.
Also glossing over an older literary tradition because the language mutated in response to a new political reality (conquest) is ... curious.
I don't think it's moving the goalposts to say that something understandable by modern French speakers has an older literary tradition than something understandable by modern English speakers. You can call what we speak today "English" but it barely resembles the language used in Beowulf.
You’re entitled to your opinion. All I’ll say is that in the context of the bald fact (French has an older literary tradition than English) presented by a previous commenter, “understandable by modern speakers” is moving the goalposts. In my opinion of course.
Also
> something understandable by modern French speakers
The Song of Roland, used as an example in a previous comment, doesn’t qualify, and actually is yet another reason why this line of argument is pretty sad.
The term "Old English" is completely misleading in this context given how distant modern English is from that language. Both were spoken in England, that's about it. Applying the same logic to "France", should we then consider Gallo-Roman works like Ausonius's Mosella (c. 370 CE) to be "French" literature?
The Beowulf manuscript dates from around 975 CE and is written in what might be better termed Anglo-Saxon. How much can you understand from this random sentence: "þa me þæt gelærdon leode mine, þa selestan, snotere ceorlas"? ("So my vassals advised me well…) I personally can't understand a single word or even relate it in any way to the English I know.
On the other hand, the Sequence of Saint Eulalia was composed in "Old French" in 880 BCE and seems rather intelligible to me. I also just took a random sentence from the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100 BC) and can understand all of it: "Seignurs, vos en ireiz. Branches d’olive en voz mains portereiz, Si me direz a Carlemagne le rei Pur le soen Deu qu’il ait mercit de mei." I'd even go so far as to say that's closer to modern French than Shakespearean English despite being written in Anglo-Norman … Which also means it should probably count as being English literature if Beowulf qualifies…
I guess the lesson here is simply to remember that reality is always a lot more granular than we first expect and that any sweeping judgements on languages, countries, etc. over the span of millennia make very little sense. By that criteria, the linked article was pure clickbait to begin with.
Fair enough!
Well if you count Old English you might as well count Latin for French too.
You might want to review the influence of William the conqueror on the English language.
You mean, Guillaume le Conquérant ?
snortèd
How fitting for that bastard to be the one who bastardized our language!!
English was Germanic - we get our Latin influence from Old French https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence_of_French_on_English
I see the French have been very busy with articles such as this.
Clearly an attempt to take the shine off of "that sub language english" which keeps pestering their ears.
From what I was repeatedly taught by my English, english teacher, all the latin loanwords came from when the Romans were hanging around the Isles. "They left more than walls!", she'd say.
Take care now, lest her ghost rise from the grave to correct your slanders against her beloved english.
English does not descend from Latin. It descends from Old English, a language that is entirely unrelated to Latin besides both being Indo-European, and has been influenced to a substantial degree by Norman French (which does descend from Latin) since the 11th century.
At least that is the conventional view. Apparently, according to this author, it actually descends from French. But that is a very fringe take.
The conventional view is that the aristocracy spoke French and the hoi poloi spoke old English.
This is why modern english is a mix.
The author does not actually make this claim, he only does tongue in cheek to show that Norman has a much larger influenced on the evolution of English vocabulary than usually thought.
> french and english both de[s]cend from latin
no
Germanic* not German.
yes
Modern English is a poor bastard child of a fair Germanic maiden brutally raped by French barbarians
They were Norse barbarians, they had just figured that Normandy was worth learning a new language (cf., “Paris is worth a Mass”).
English is 0% German other than loanwords like "zeitgeist".
What is more accurate to say is that English and German descend from a common ancestor: Proto-Germanic. Saying English descended from German would be just as wrong as saying German descended from English.
The fact that "German" and "Germanic" sound similar does not mean that they are the same thing, nor that modern standard German is somehow the official representative of the Germanic languages.
IIRC the reason that the family got the name "Germanic" is basically that it was some Germans that came up with the idea. I'm having trouble sourcing this though.
The romans called the area Germania after the germani that lived there. Germani is believed to be a celtic word though. So it's possible that the original Germani were actual celtic speakers. Which is another branch of old indo-european.
Last I heard was that the German tribe the language group was named after weren't even germanic soeakers. Like the fact that the Franks were a germanic speaking tribe who abandoned their language for the local dialect of latin which become French.
The German word for the ancient Germanics isn’t the same as their word for present-day Germans (Germanen vs. Deutsche).
true
Except "German" is an English word for Deutsch
You are welcome, and I will see myself out.. lol =3
I always describe English as having a Latin alphabet, a Germanic grammar, and a universal vocabulary.
I don't know how much truth there is to this, but I've heard a story about the difference in French/Germanic word usage may stem from inequalities from the Norman invasion - the masters were speaking French, and the common folk were doing the dirty work speaking old English derived from germanic languages. So, the masters were dealing with the finished product with French words - beef, pork, mutton, veal, venison, poultry - and the commoners were dealing with animals with Germanic words - cow, pig, sheep, deer, chicken, etc
> Hottentotten etc
I mean, you too can have an infinite vocabulary if you just leave out the spaces between words.
hahaha. exactly!
Don't fall for the divisive trolling... many places teach all three languages as part of the grade school curriculum. French is less concise structurally, German has phoneme that are difficult to pronounce, and English was derived from centuries of merging in countless trading partner pop cultures.
The reason English is difficult to learn is many generation 2 languages words are no longer directly correlated with the original meanings. There were even writers that made fun of what English would sound like to an unbiased observer. Don't ask your LLM "is there a Seahorse emoji"... =3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok
And French is just bad Vulgar Latin and Gaulish.
There is no such thing as purity or correctness in language - those concepts are farcical. Every second of every day language evolves with the words and pronunciations of the people currently using it. If enough people spell or pronounce the "wrong" way, it becomes the "right" way.
French today is slightly different than it was yesterday, and the day before, and 50 years ago.
I think we have like 5 words left from Gaul in modern french (only one I know is 'talus'). Old central French was mostly vulgar latin+frankish, with a bit of Gaulish and Arabic, then Gaulish was traded for latin and greek forcibly thanks to the french 'Academie' that made central/Parisian french the only french, and we lost a lot (a _lot_) of words. What's funny is that English, beside Normand french, borrowed a lot from French before that,and we borrowed those words back, with a different meaning, or sometimes a similar one.
> There is no such thing as purity or correctness in language
There certainly is, in the case of French and other languages that have a central authority defining what is pure and correct.
Defining something as pure by fiat seems nonsensical, but the world is strange that way.
Especially if it applies outside the jurisdiction. Why should the Parisian government get to declare that Quebecois is impure?
People massively overstate the power and influence of the Académie française. It is essentially just a cultural organization. Sure, it claims to officially regulate the French language, but its decisions are not actually binding on anyone, not even the government or the education system, and are in fact widely ignored.
In actual practice, French is about as regulated as English is (i.e., not at all) and French people use tons of loanwords from various languages, especially English and Arabic.
It's been a while since I've talked about this with somebody from France, but if I remember correctly, they take pride in speaking real French rather than speaking pure French. I wish I remember the words they used.
In other words, they recognize the Académie as the authority on purity, and then reject purity.
> its decisions are not actually binding on anyone
IME they are binding on French learners who, instead of being taugh French as she is spoke (haha) are taught French à la Académie Française.
How I wish we could cut these reactionary fossils from our tax money. It is nonsensical, and should no longer exist.
They are tasked with maintaining an "official" dictionary, but have only published 9 editions so far, in over 300 years. The last one, that was just finished (only took 45 years) misses very important words like "web", "mail" or "homophobie" because they're supposedly too recent, but somehow includes "woke". In a French dictionary. What a fucking joke.
Same issue occurs with food.
"Authentic" ... I'm not opposed to the word, but I want to know the context / time period they're shooting for.
The range of possibilities with food and food evolution and influences can be very wide.
This reminds me of the the onion's piece "I bet I can speak Spanish" https://theonion.com/i-bet-i-can-speak-spanish-1819583640/
hahahaha thank you for that, it hit my funny bone just right
If you actually put the sentences in that article into Google translate, it things you're speaking Ilocano, which is apparently a language from the Phillipines.
Ha, you made me read that article.
Google translate is actually making an eminently reasonable guess. Filipino languages are full of transliterated Spanish loan words. The syllabic structure of the sentences, though it still looks like gibberish to me, also bear more than a passing resemblance to Filipino languages.
French is actually <30%. There is a well-sourced Wikipedia article about this.
• French (including Old French: 11.66%; Anglo-French: 1.88%; and French: 14.77%): 28.30%;
• Latin (including modern scientific and technical Latin): 28.24%;
• Germanic languages (including Old English, Proto-Germanic and others: 20.13%;
• Old Norse: 1.83%; Middle English: 1.53%; Dutch: 1.07%; excluding Germanic words borrowed from a Romance language): 25%;[a]
• Greek: 5.32%;
• no etymology given: 4.04%;
• derived from proper names: 3.28%; and
• all other languages: less than 1%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-language_influences_in...
Also, one could argue French itself is an agglomeration of Vulgar Latin (87%) as well as its own Frankish Germanic roots (10%), and a few of Gaulish and Breton Celtic origin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_words_of_German...
It is not straightforward to define a metric like this. What counts as an "English word" ? There are books full of the scientific names of plant and animal species, which usually come from Latin; do these count as "English words" ? What's the cutoff?
IMO, a much better metric is frequency-weighted; that is, taking some corpus of real English and counting the words in it, rather than weighting "every English word" with the value 1.
If you do this frequency-weighted analysis, Old English is far ahead of French and Latin combined (especially in colloquial speech; they're closer in formal writing).
None of the languages have their own static existence. Just like a river doesn't have a precise start location and end location, a language doesn't have a precise boundary in space and time. More so in time. Language can't be separated from culture, people and place. All of these - language, culture, people, and places change massively over time, to the extent of losing identity.
If English doesn't exist on its own, French doesn't either. Nor does Latin, Greek or Sanskrit. All of these are incremental variations or dialects of some other language.
Thanks, mate. If you’ve got other theories like that, I don’t want to hear them either
I am equally surprised and enertained by how offended some people are regarding this article.
FYI: The above sentence contains 7 words that come from old french/latin, and 7 that come from old english/german
it's tongue in cheek. the book is an act of mild trolling.
As a person with ears who is mildly versed in English and enough Spanish to get some landscaping done, it's extremely obvious that French is the badly pronounced English, and not vice versa.
> it was French that equipped English to become the language of international communication, _a state of affairs which should be celebrated as la francophonie’s greatest achievement_.
Imagine making this claim to a proud French language partisan. You'd have to rush them to the hospital.
French was in fact the language of international diplomacy prior to WWII. Russians, Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Italians, etc, would communicate in French.
English adopted that position after WWII.
French still is the language of international diplomacy in some (dwindling) circles.
Someone would be going to go the the hospital indeed, but it's not necessarily the one you think.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
--James D. Nicoll
The author is right to critique Cerquiglini. The French legacy is largely lexical. The syntax and the old, short words of English are Germanic. Its several influences drove the relatively large lexicon we have, and probably adapted English to be a globally adaptive language, borrowing words readily.
Þis gewrit is scræp. Hit is alyfed to awritan fullice riht Englisc butan þæm fule Frenciscan wordum eallunga.
ᚩᚻ ᛈᛚᛠᛋᛖ ᛖᚠᛖᚱᛁᚩᚾᛖ ᚪᛈᛈᚱᛖᚳᛡᛏᛖᛋ ᚦᛖ ᛏᚱᚢᛖ ᚪᛝᛚᛁᛋᚻ
soþlice!
Oh yeah, say this in French: That jumbo jet's glitchy huddle of passengers found the giggle and fluke of landing to be randomly serendipity-inducing.
LMGTFY:
https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=fr&text=That%20jumbo%...
Having Google Translate take that into French and then back gave me "The passengers of this jumbo jet, caught in a quagmire resembling an ocean liner, found a happy accident in this chaotic and surprising landing." I quite like both sentences.
I can barely say that in English, and I'm a native speaker.
A glitchy huddle of passengers?
I think that glitchy is not used meaningfully. A huddle of glitchy passengers, perhaps, if they are all androids.
do androids dream of electric airliners?
They weren't staying in their seats is another more prosaic explanation.
The mutual borrowing between both languages is really amusing when visiting Montreal.
I sat down in a restaurant in the historic part of the city, and the menu was loaded with "apostrophe s" and "le Hamburger". I then looked at my server and said, in plain English, "My high school French teacher used to make fun of this as 'franglais'".
The server then laughed and told me, "oh, we mix English into French here all the time and don't care."
The next day I walked by a youth American football league in a city park.
Even my mother's household, which was Quebec-French speaking in the US, would say "poe-tat" instead of "pomme de terre." ("Potato" with a French accent instead of the literal "apple of the earth" word that I learned in school.)
Nice anecdotes, but the last one is a misinterpretation that got me into a rabbit hole. "poe-tat" is juste "patate" and is widely used not the least because it's just faster to say than "pomme de terre" (following Zipf's law of abbreviation and the principle of least effort). It's more informal, but it's pedigree is excellent as it comes from Taíno via Spanish, was first recorded in 1582 and recorded by the French Academy in 1762… which was actually only the case for "pomme de terre" in 1835! It seems that "pomme de terre" referred to other tubers in the distant past, but that the famous agronomist Parmentier remarketed "patates" as "pommes de terre" in the 18th century to promote their acceptance.
I think you're better at getting the phonetics across than I am.
The fact is that, for a long time, British kings considered themselves kings of France as well - and even believed that France was the senior kingdom. The language they spoke reflected that attitude.
That said, as a Frenchman who has to speak English every day, I can assure you that English has long since become its own thing!
They spoke French because they were Normans and married mostly with the continental aristocracy.
Their claim to the French throne was based on the rules of succession and an argument over them (arising from those intertwinned lineages).
An interesting fact is that King Richard I (Sean Connery in Robin Hood with Kevin Costner)'s mother was from South West France and he grew up there, and so he spoke French and Occitan but not really English.
[1]
Henry IV was the first English king to speak english natively since before the conquest. Mel Gibson's Braveheart is particularly ridiculous because everyone would have been speaking various amounts of Norman French to each other in reality. Wallace, the Bruce, Edward I and II, the various other nobles.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_claims_to_the_French_t...
The syntax has morphed from Germanic languages, but with Norman vocabulary. Norman was a dialect of French from before the standardization of l'Académie Française.
Yes, and Norman was a "creole" of a Germanic language brought in by the viking conquest and French, which itself is a creole of a Celtic-based language and Latin (due to the conquest of France by romans). Celts and Vikings were already presents in the British islands. See [1] for the "genealogy" of European languages. So William the Conqueror brought to England more of the same things plus a few more (and the endemic mismatch of spelling and pronunciation I guess).
France is sort-of at the crossroads of Europe, so it's no surprise that there's a little bit of everything in the French language. This is particularly visible in place-names of Normandy [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indo-European_language...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_toponymy
Nah - there are two vocabularies, the 'posh' Norman French one, and the common western Germanic one. (There is also an admixture of Norse influence, so the combination of Old English (Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians) with Old Norse then knocking the edges off. That probably did for grammatical gender.)
The Germanic core still generally gets used by all in high stress environments.
Latin and various forms of French are bigger contributors to overall vocabulary than German and Dutch. It does seem to me that much of the core vocabulary day to day or that would be used in a pidgin of English by word use frequency is more Germanic, but I personally don’t know of a study showing that.
And yes, certain situations do tend to favor the Germanic portions to include especially coarser words.
I was not referring to the well known 4 letter words used to describe parts of the anatomy. They merely get used for emphasis.
Under fight / violence / battle conditions, the active vocabulary is Germanic, and not lacking in expressive power, nor subject to misunderstanding.
well, makes me think of this guy reading labels in french in Canada: https://www.instagram.com/steven.massicotte/
> Cerquiglini argues that the role of French in the birth of the English language was much deeper than is generally admitted. It is the French influence, he says, that saved English from being just another variant of Dutch. As such it was French that equipped English to become the language of international communication, a state of affairs which should be celebrated as la francophonie’s greatest achievement.
This sounds like either unfalsifiable bullshit being portrayed as scholarship, or deliberate trolling by a French guy who likes French and wants to mock English-speakers. I'd have more respect for the latter, since at least that's just making fun of a more powerful neighboring culture (a fun pastime for everyone) rather than trying to assert real facts about the world.
They’re just mad they lost the “lingua Franca” of the world title so this is the way for them to hang on to the coattails of relevance. The Normans didn’t even speak Parisian French but a Breton variant and also had with them some Norse words they kept. But they can pretend.
The only thing that made French and English afterwards the lingua francas of the world was the commerce/trade and innovation offered by their speakers.
We could all be using Spanish or Chinese as the lingua Franca if either of them had more influence in the world.
I agree with the sentiment, but Normans speaking a Breton variant of French… Oh gosh… And why "they"? What's with the lumping of 300+ million French speakers with the personal opinion of one person? What's that talk about relevance as if not being number 1 meant that the language was damned?
I have not read the linguist's essay, just the article, but I am almost certain the claims are preposterous.
The article already mentions that the structure is definitely germanic in origin. Next are the words. Some are adopted from other languages, but many more have roots in Germanic and Latin. The reason is that Romans invaded Britain some 2000 years ago. Afterwards, Latin was spoken in learned circles until the renaissance and even later.
When French became the language of diplomacy, IIRC at the time of Napoleon, only that's when French became a language of note. That's when the "sofisticated" words like veal, venison etc. enter the English language.
But, even all that aside, my native language is Slavic. I speak both English and German, and a very little bit of French. In my limited personal view, German and English have much more in common than French and English.
Reply to self: it seems I was wrong and veal, venison, etc. have roots in Old French, which has influenced Old English through Normandic invasion.
Still, I stand by my assessment: while it's clear that influences are there to some of the words, it's clearly more germanic. Just as we say today that French is a romanic language and English is germanic. I see no evidence here to counter this common classification.
See this excellent book: Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme and Other Oddities of the English Language
It details the historical reasons why English is completely broken in terms of spelling and pronunciation. It makes sense of why it’s such a mess. Light read, kinda fun (said the history nerd who loves language).
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55332395-highly-irregula...
This seems to pay lip service* to Latin which was used in England for a thousand years before the Norman invasion and was still in use up to the 17th century. No, it wasn't used in the pub or the market, but it did influence the language strongly.
* see what I did there
alternatively, Modern English is North Germanic (Scandanavian)
https://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/477070.html
https://brill.com/view/journals/ldc/6/1/article-p1_1.xml
The whole thing does not make sense to me because the grammars are so different. In English you say "Mary's house". In French it's "La maison de Marie."
And yet, you'd say "the House of the Virgin Mary" or "the House of Windsor" in English (which translate to "la Maison de la Vierge Marie", but the "Maison Windsor" in French). English grammar has incorporated a lot of key Romance features alongside its Germanic ones.
The book's title is not from Clemenceau, but from Alexandre Dumas, in "Twenty years after" (the sequel to the Three Musketeers).
Fun fact: this passage is somehow excised from the English translation of the book used by Project Gutenberg and Wikisource! (you can see it in the original French version, chapter 68: "l'anglais n'est que du français mal prononcé")
Recently, as my kid is learning to read and write Danish, while I've started to use English more and more, due to work. My observation is that English isn't that great a language, it's just very popular. The more English I speak, read and write, the more I appreciate my own native language.
It's really sad to see English language and words replace native ones, especially if your own language in many cases have better precision and quite frankly reads better. Recently I listened to a "Danish" podcast, about Charlie Kirk. I put Danish in " " because one of the hosts, a native Dane, struggles severely with expressing her thoughts and observation without the use of English.
English is easy to criticize. It doesn't have all the letters it needs. It doesn't have compound noun. A significant part of the vocabulary is just borrow from Norse, German or French (and pronounced wrong). It is however VERY popular, billions speak it, and that's a quality all on it's own.
There's also the asymmetry that a Danish podcaster felt it necessary to talk about the English-speaking American Charlie Kirk, whereas I struggle to think of a time I've listened to an English-language podcast about a Danish poltical figure.
The popularity of English has little or nothing to do with any facts about how its grammatical system works, and a lot to do with the geopolitical situation of the past few centuries where the UK and then the US were globally important powers.
I wonder if the Nordic languages would be in a healthier state in this respect, in terms of usage and not resorting to English in mixed groups, if their television broadcasting had been shared among each other more, instead of each country looking so much to the USA for programming. The Nordic countries used to be a single linguistic space for educated people and you can still witness this practice among the elderly. Why exactly couldn't young people growing up in, for example, Sweden and Denmark watch and learn from Norway's Uti vår hage just like Americans could watch Monty Python or Fawlty Towers?
Norwegian and Swedish seems to be healthier than Danish. I don't have the feeling that Danes generally gives a shit about the health of the language and a decent percentage would probably favour just switching to English entirely.
You don't think you prefer Danish because Danish is your native language and English is not?
Possibly, but I wonder why so many Danes prefer English words, when we have Danish words that are often more descriptive. My preference have also change over the years, from more heavily favouring English previously, to now opting for Danish whenever possible (e.g. when reading books).
I had an iconic Latin teacher that would wander the campus wearing headphones listening to opera at full blast and muttering to himself, "French is but a vulgar form of Latin."
"English isn’t a dialect of French. The grammatical structure of English is almost entirely Germanic and no amount of sophistry can change that."
It might be seen as a dialect of German but with the heavy influence English had on the German language in the past decades it's more that German is like an English dialect now.
I wouldn’t say historically a dialect of German. English and German are both Germanic languages, so closely related languages not dialects of either.
You are right, of course. My point was more that German nowadays borrows more from English than vice versa. I should not have written "historically" (and have deleted it since), because that is obviously wrong. What I meant to say is that over time the direction of influence switched around.
Except it didn't get those Germanic qualities by borrowing them from German, it got them by shared heritage.
German and English are related, but not that closely. The Germanic language groups are not the same as German the (modern) language.
English is more closely related to Frisian than German.
You are right, see my comment to kelipso.
Isn't English a Germanic language though?
Yes, it is a Germanic language. The title is a tongue-in-cheek jibe about how much the English language has borrowed from French and Latin. I believe the majority of English words come from Latin/French although the top 100 most spoken words are generally Germanic. People seem to forget that England was ruled by French speaking people for a long time, and that had a huge impact on the development of the English we speak today.
> The author knows this of course. His point is not to win the argument, but rather to give a new perspective on the traditional rivalry between the English and French languages.
Englandbros - we ride at dawn.
I'm thinking about this. I'm sitting on my veranda in my pyjamas having just enjoyed a pukka curry!!
One important thing not mentioned. English has no genders except in extremely rare cases. Other Indo-European languages are full of genders, like female tables, male autos, etc.
Trying to learn Spanish in high school, it was genders that confused me the most. Safe to say I just remember some words at this point.
English only has sex, not gender. He, She, It.
The commonly cited example of referring to ships as 'she' is simply an affectation, grammatically a ship is an it.
Or can you provide another example I may have overlooked?
I was thinking of ship, I am far from a language scholar.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Germanic_and_Latinate_...
I hate (I know, strong word but I really do) French and Latin possessives and French pronunciation. German makes much more sense and thankfully English is a Germanic language.
Danish is even better. More simplified with the exception of integrating the article into the word itself; other than that slightly simpler than English.
This is a linguist troll, by a French linguist. English is West and North Germanic, with Norman French, Latin, and Greek loans. In fact Latin loans are the same amount as French, 28% each.
But it doesn't have grammatical gender which is a HUGE improvement.
Grammatical gender lets you be very precise with fewer words. I can say in German with just 4 words both "I am on the hill" and "I am passing over the hill" by just changing the case of one word. It's the same sentence but only one letter changes and it completely changes the meaning of the sentence.
German was designed by a programmer.
That doesn't have anything to do with grammatical gender, it's because of noun declension that that is possible. It's only incidental that nouns of each of the three genders decline differently; case distinctions could still be made even if there was only one gender.
Is that grammatical gender or declension?
If you are going to have to remember an attribute for every single noun it should really be a MEANINGFUL one instead of something utterly arbitrary like gender. Some examples are animate or inanimate like Algonquian languages do or the physical properties of an object, such as its shape, size, or consistency like the Athabaskan languages do.
Just wait until they find out Dutch exists
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